Drought in Northeastern Montana draws 1988 comparisons

The NOAA National Weather Service gave their monthly Weather-Ready Briefing last Tuesday and the news for most in Phillips County is bleak.

"There is really no good news coming out of Northeast Montana at this point," said Patrick Gilchrist of NOAA National Weather Service in Glasgow. "We have been so dry and since May the precipitation has just shut off."

On Monday, June 19, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock issued an executive order declaring 19 counties in Montana, including Phillips County, are in a drought emergency (other counties are Blaine, Carter, Custer, Daniels, Dawson, Fallon, Garfield, Hill, McCone, Petroleum, Powder River, Prairie, Richland, Roosevelt, Rosebud, Sheridan, Valley, and Wibaux Counties, as well as the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, according to the Great Falls Tribune.)

Gilchrist told the PCN that the far eastern portion of Phillips County is in severe drought and added that extreme drought is taking place in Garfield and Valley counties. He said it is hard to tell at which point Phillips County will tip extreme drought.

"I would guess it will be sooner rather than later," he said.

As of Thursday, June 29, the Bureau of Land Management announced Stage 1 fire restrictions in Blaine, Roosevelt, Sheridan and Valley County as well as the tribal lands within the Fort Belknap Reservation, located in both Blaine and Phillips counties.

Traditionally, May and June are months in Montana which receive the most rain. This past May and June, however, rainfall has been well below average and the April –through- June precipitation total in Zortman was only 2.28 inches, the 5th driest rank during that period and in Saco, only 0.88 inches of precipitation marking the driest on record.

"We have seen more or less over the last 10 years, above normal precipitation across Northeast Montana which has produced a lot of grasses, crops have done well, ranchers have done well with hay," Gilchrist said. "But come this year, boy, we've really just hit a wall and that precipitation tap has just shut off."

Gilchrist said the drought of 1988 seems to be the one most people remember as one of the driest in recent memory. He said that precipitation totals for the first six months of 2017 in Glasgow, Wolf Point, and Medicine Lake are below the precipitation totals in those areas during the 1998 drought.

"I think that really shows how things have dramatically changed here in a very short amount of time as far as not seeing precipitation of any kind," he said. " Because 1988 was a long-term drought over the course of years and it took time to really hit that low point as far as drought conditions."

Gilchrist showed a picture of wheat crops taken on land between Fort Peck and Glasgow. He said normally at this time of year, the wheat generally was over knee-deep and too thick to walk through. Today, the crop is patchy looking and the yields aren't going to be good.

"If they even bother to harvest," said Gilchrist. "Something I have been seeing, even at my place, are large cracks forming in the clay soils. It shows just how dry it is when that clay soil can crack when there is no moisture."

Gilchrist said that soil moisture depletion is rapidly becoming a problem and a recent probe conducted by the Glasgow office showed that during the month of May alone, with little moisture and very high winds, that a total of eight inches of soil moisture was lost.

"When you compare that to an area that only gets about 12 inches of soil moisture over the course of the year, that is a pretty substantial loss," said Gilchrist. "So, again, we are right there with some of the worst droughts we have seen out in northeast Montana."

Gilchrist asked people to submit impacts at http://droughtreporter.unl.edu/submitreport/ to help gather data about the current drought.